All Souls Page 6

  At high tables, this is a moment of great solemnity and (plastic) beauty, when all the guests rise and, forming up in line again (a ragged, unsteady and anarchic one this time), progress into another large room, less formal and more welcoming than the refectory, where for an hour and a half they partake in leisurely fashion of fresh fruit, tropical fruit, dried fruit, ice cream, cakes, pies, sorbets, biscuits, wafers and chocolates: plain, mint and liqueur, whilst simultaneously circulating, at great speed and in a clockwise direction, several bottles or rather carafes of various rare ports unobtainable at any ordinary vintners. During this second more auspicious phase of the supper, more medieval than eighteenth-century in flavour and known locally as "eating bananas in the moonlight", one can finally change one's conversational partners, talk to anyone for as long as one likes, and, as the port both sharpens the desire to make up for lost time and puts the finishing touches to the verbal deterioration wrought by the wines drunk during the first phase, the conversation grows generalised, unruly, violent and chaotic, even indecent at times. There is also the remote possibility that at some point the Warden (like everything else this is entirely at his discretion) will decide to toast the Queen, which is the signal that one can at last smoke. But the moment of great solemnity and (plastic) beauty I mentioned occurs when the guests leave the refectory, for as they do so each one bears in his or her hand, the napkin they've been using, however stained and crumpled, and the swaying passage of that small piece of white cloth (the moment has the slightly martial air about it inevitable when people walk in single or double file) contrasts sublimely with the slow billowing line of black gowns. As we marched in, Clare, with a nicely ironic touch, tucked her napkin into her neckline like a bib, thus covering up her décolletage. She started laughing and, I think, included me in her laughter. Afterwards, during dessert and for what remained of the evening, she sat far off from me next to Toby Rylands and near her husband and did not look at me again. After a certain moment I was free once more to smoke cigarette after cigarette, thanks to an unexpected show of tolerance or perhaps a sudden display of loyalty to the Crown on the part of the Warden.

  THAT WAS THE NIGHT I knew for certain that I would remember my time in the city of Oxford as a time of unease and that whatever was begun or whatever happened there would be touched or contaminated by that one overriding feeling and would, therefore, in the context of the rest of my life, which is not on the whole troubled or uneasy, be condemned to insignificance, to dispersal and forgetting like the tales told in novels or like most of our dreams. That's why now I'm making this effort of memory and writing, because I know that otherwise it will all be obliterated, as will those who have died, those who make up one half of our lives, the half who, together with the living, complete our lives, although, in fact, it isn't always easy to tell what separates and distinguishes one from the other, I mean, what distinguishes the living from the dead whom we knew when alive. I would end up obliterating the dead of Oxford. My dead. My example.

  In a way, since everyone who lives in Oxford either feels or is in some way troubled, there's nothing remarkable about the fact that my time in the city was one of unease. For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally forth into the world (to London, for example) that in itself is enough to have them gasping for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in time. But I was used to existing in time and in the world (in Madrid, for example) and consequently, as I discovered that night, my unease was bound to be of a different order, perhaps contrary to the norm. Having always been in the world (having spent my life in the world) I suddenly found myself outside it, as if I'd been transplanted into another element, water perhaps, and a full realisation of the extent of my unease arose from that unexpected glimpse of my childhood in Clare's eyes, for it is during childhood that we feel most comfortable in the world, or to put it in a more precisely infantile way, when the world is most worldlike, when time has more substance and the dead are not yet one half of our lives.

  After supper I went up to Cromer-Blake's rooms at the college to have a nightcap before going home to bed. Without taking his gown off, he got out two glasses and opened a bottle with assured, methodical movements. I thought: "Here in Oxford, the one really decisive factor is not just that I'm a foreigner about whom no one knows or cares, about whom the only fact of any biographical significance is that I won't be staying here for ever, it's that there's no one here who knew me as a young man or as a child. That's what really troubles me, leaving the world behind and having no previous existence in this world, there being no witness here to my continuity, to the fact that I haven't always swum in this water. Cromer-Blake knows a little about me, from some time back, through my predecessors from Madrid and Barcelona. But that's all, information received before I had a face and was still nothing more than a name. But that's reason enough - this friendship by proxy - to condemn him to being my strongest link with this city, the person of whom I will ask all those questions that must be asked and to whom I will come whenever some problem arises here, be it illness, infamy or a serious emotional crisis. He's the person whom I intend asking right now about the woman at supper, Clare Bayes. As soon as he's poured the drinks and sat down I'll ask him about her and her husband. Cromer-Blake, with his greying hair and pale face and the moustache which every few weeks, in a state of perpetual indecision, he grows then shaves off; Cromer-Blake with his inimitable English accent that admiring students say is exactly the way they used to speak on the BBC; Cromer-Blake with his incisive mind and his extraordinary interpretations of Valle-Inclán, with his look of a man of the cloth expelled from the bosom of the Church and with his complete absence of family feeling, is condemned to being both father and mother figure to me in this city, even though he did not know me — at all — as a child or as a young man (I'm over thirty years old now, so he can't be said to have known me in my youth). The woman at supper knew nothing about my childhood or my youth either and yet, how, I don't know, she saw my childhood and allowed me to see hers, to see her as a child. I know, however, that in this city I can't rely on her to be either the father- or even the mother-figure each of us always needs at all times and in all places, whatever our age or our status. Even the oldest and most powerful of men need such figures right to the end of their days and if they find it difficult or are unable to light upon someone to embody those two figures, that in no way denies their need for them or belies the fantasies provoked by their search or by the sense of their lack, their need, their expectation and their imagination of them.

  Cromer-Blake poured me a glass of port, apologised for the inferior quality compared with the port imbibed with our high-table desserts, then sat down in an armchair. I was already seated on the sofa opposite him, also still with my gown on. We were both fairly drunk but in him that never proved a barrier to holding a conversation. We spoke sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes each in his own language.

  "Cheers," he said and took a sip of wine. "It wasn't so bad, was it? Apart from your baptism of cider, from which, if it's any consolation, no one in college has escaped this year. There was no mischief intended in seating you next to him, you were simply the only one at table as yet unbaptised. Halliwell's new here and that spiel of his is by way of being a very long-winded visiting card. The worst of it is that he never gets beyond that because no one will ever give the poor chap a second chance."

  'That was hardly the worst part...," I began, but Cromer-Blake, who clearly considered that the best part of those high tables consisted in large measure in the after-dinner postmortems, left me no space to tell him what I thought had been the worst part.

  "Oh, the worst part was Dayanand," he said.

  I was going to mention the Warden's salacious and reckless behaviour and take the opportunity to ask Cromer-Blake about Clare and Edward Bayes, but that
clearly held neither novelty nor interest for him. I watched him taking tiny sips of port, his long legs crossed, the skirts of his gown cascading about them, his black figure crowned in white and framed by shelves full of books in Spanish and English, as if his own attitude, his appearance, his posture and his surroundings were nothing more than an aesthetic disguise. But he wasn't at all a ridiculous figure and I thought: "Women and any of the feelings they might arouse have no importance for Cromer-Blake, even when they might well be the mother-, father- or even daughter-figure he needs. For, indispensable though those figures are throughout one's whole life, they're incapable of causing conflicts or major upsets and are, therefore, unworthy of after-dinner comment. Clare Bayes might well be such a figure for Cromer-Blake whereas for me she could be so, at best, only very incidentally or only if she one day definitively ceased to be that other figure, whatever conflictive, disturbing identity I decided or rather will decide to attribute to her. One's enemies, on the other hand, are worthy of these exhaustive, obsessive after-dinner commentaries. One's greatest enemies are those who are also one's greatest friends. Cromer-Blake has always introduced Dayanand, the Indian doctor, as a great friend which, of course, equips him -indeed is the ideal qualification - to become the most bitter of enemies. As for the Warden, Cromer-Blake is doubtless used to him by now."

  "I didn't get a chance to talk to him."

  "So much the better for you. Didn't you notice the way he kept looking at us all through supper?"

  "I certainly did. I was on the receiving end of one of his scorching looks; I suppose he didn't approve of my overt admiration of your friend Clare any more than he did of the Warden's."

  "I don't think that's what it was about. He glowered at all three of us, at the Warden, at you and me. You don't imagine he cares what His Lordship gets up to at these suppers, do you? He's been much worse than that: once, during dessert, he insisted on decorating the bosom of the Dean of York's wife with a necklace made out of mandarin segments. It happened in plain view of everyone there, we didn't know where to put ourselves, but no one said or did anything to let on that any of us had even noticed our imaginative Warden's sudden interest in the ornamental possibilities of fruit. The Dean, it must be said, showed astonishing sang-froid, fortitude and possibly restraint, observing the scene from the other end of the table with an impartial eye, almost as if he could only see the positive side of the affair, as if they were helping him out with some future task or furnishing him with a good idea. The next day Dayanand laughed out loud every time he remembered the Dean of York's profound impassivity and the even more praiseworthy example set by his buxom lady wife, who allowed herself to be hung with jewels, offering no more than a blushing smile and a few demure words of protest. And do you imagine that Clare didn't know what she was doing when she chose to wear that particular dress? Winding up His Lordship is one of our oldest pastimes. No, Dayanand was glowering at you because you were my guest tonight and at the Warden because he knows that at the moment I'm doing him a few favours, or rather, we're doing each other a few favours. He and I have been working pretty much hand in glove lately. All Dayanand's glowering was aimed at me, I'm sure of it. He did it first through intermediaries, then it was my turn to be crucified with red-hot nails. How dare he?"

  The last question was purely rhetorical.

  "I thought you were such close friends."

  "Oh, we are. And what's more he's my doctor, a splendid one I wouldn't want to lose. As soon as I feel the hint of a sore throat I'm off to his rooms for him to have me stick out my tongue and give me a few pills. I'm eternally in his debt, but not so much that I have to put up with his wild looks across the table, with twenty other people as witnesses." In other circumstances I would immediately have asked the reason for those looks that had so upset and offended Cromer-Blake and whose cause he nonetheless seemed to understand perfectly well, but I couldn't wait to find out about Clare Bayes and was waiting for a convenient opening to the conversation that would allow me to return to the subject. Not finding one, I fell silent and Cromer-Blake, as he sometimes did, adopted an air of seriousness that seemed to have nothing to do with what was going on around him nor with what his companion was saying: it was something that welled up from within him, like the false solemnity that precedes and surrounds soliloquies in the theatre. And the more he talked, the more his head sank onto his chest and the more he seemed to be talking to himself.

  "I can't suit my tastes and my desires to his, I mean I can't avoid coinciding with them. If I did I'd spend my whole life feeling handcuffed and frustrated, having to ask his permission before I started up any new pastime or passion in this city; it would mean having to reject the most tempting of offers, having to put on hold my best seduction techniques in order, before carrying them through, to go to his rooms and ask him if he had any objections, if my sexual activities or even my affections in any way clashed with his past life or with his future plans, if I might in any way wound him retrospectively or in advance, if he'd noticed or was considering noticing such and such a pretty face or athletic body at that moment at my disposal in my bedroom. It would be ridiculous: 'Dayanand, do you have any objection to my going to bed with a certain naked person I happen to have in my room at this present moment? Now take a good look at him and make quite sure, just in case you change your mind later.' It would be ridiculous. But something's going to have to be done, he's taken it very badly. Who does he think he is, behaving like that? Who does he think he is, asking me direct questions about my personal life? Who does he think he is, adopting that desperate tone with me? I can't be the cause of his desperation, and I'm not. Who does he think he is, calling me to account? And right at the end of supper, it's unbelievable. Jack's the one he needs to talk to." Cromer-Blake paused, as if the name he'd just pronounced were an internal signal to end the soliloquy and grow less serious; he stroked his wispy hair, emptied his glass in one gulp and added as, with unsteady hand, he poured himself another: "The man's insanely jealous, he's a fanatic."

  Drink makes me laconic, although I remain a good listener. It had no such effect on Cromer-Blake who talked resolutely on, but it did make him momentarily forget to whom he was speaking and he thus mentioned subjects which, though he made no secret of them to me (probably because I would not be staying in Oxford for ever) he would not have spoken about so frankly had he been sober. Were I a malevolent person (which I'm not), I would have made the right noises to fan his bad temper and he would have divulged to me every detail of that quarrel over sentimental or sexual rivalries. But the truth is I wasn't interested in such details that night, although I've often speculated about them since with more than mere curiosity, with a real longing to know. I'd like to have known the identity of that person (that "Jack") whom at the time both Dayanand and Cromer-Blake wanted or rather, perhaps, wanted to hang on to. I'd like to have known the identity of that vital nexus uniting them, for it seems possible that it was that person, for whom on that winter night I felt barely a glimmer of curiosity, who bound them together for life or beyond that into death, even though one of them is still in the land of the living and the other in the land of the dead. "And what about Edward Bayes? Is he a fanatic too? Or is he more like the Dean of York?" Cromer-Blake gave a short, serene laugh and regained at a stroke the joviality he'd shown at the beginning of our conversation. "We're all capable of being like the Dean of York at one time or another. Do I take it you're seriously interested in Clare?"

  "No, not really. I think my mind's still very much on a young girl I saw some days ago on the train from London and again yesterday in Broad Street. But since I don't know who she is and may never see her again I might well begin to think about your friend Clare too." - "What an idiot," I thought, "why can't I think about something more fruitful, more interesting? Relationships with those with whom we have no blood ties never are; the possible variety of paths such a relationship can take are minimal, the surprises all fakes, the different stages mere formalities, it's all so infanti
le: the approaches, the consummations, the estrangements; the fulfilment, the battles, the doubts; the certainties, the jealousies, the abandonment and the laughter; it wears you out even before it's begun. I feel troubled by my absence from the world and can no longer tell the difference between what I should spend my time thinking about and what is just a deplorable waste of time and thought. I feel completely off-balance and I shouldn't be thinking about either of them, the girl or Clare Bayes. The one thing I shouldn't be doing is thinking about them. I'm just drunk and generally confused. Here I am with all the time in the world in this static city I happen to have ended up in, and I'm turning into an idiot." I continued my thoughts out loud to Cromer-Blake: "I shouldn't be thinking about these things, I should be thinking about something more interesting. More to the point, I should be talking about something more interesting, I'm sorry."

  "Is there anything more interesting?" Cromer-Blake had once more adopted a serious tone, though less serious than before and without losing his indulgent, good-humoured air. This was real after-dinner talk. He'd taken out a cigarette from the packet I'd placed on the table and rather ineffectively put a flame to it with my lighter. He never carried cigarettes or matches of his own. He held the cigarette as if it were a pencil. He didn't inhale. In fact he didn't really know how to smoke at all.

  "I suppose not," I said and drank the last of my port while I looked for answers; Cromer-Blake refilled my glass. His hand was steady again. I relit his cigarette, properly this time.

  'Thanks. I mean, take me, take Dayanand, or even the Warden; take Kavanagh, Toby or the Ripper, who, given their ages and temperaments, must surely lead chaste lives. And take Ted of course. Well, you don't know them as well as I do. Oh, yes, I know them all. Not one of us thinks of anything else all day but men and women, the whole day is just a process one goes through in order to be able to stop at a given moment and devote oneself to thinking about them, the whole point of stopping work or study is nothing more than being able to think about them; even when we're with them, we're thinking about them, or at least I am. They're not the parentheses; the classes and the research are, so are the reading and the writing, the lectures and the ceremonies, the suppers and the meetings, the finances and the politicking, everything in fact that passes here for activity. Productive activity, the thing that brings us money and security and prestige and allows us to live, what keeps a city or a country going, what organises it, is the thing that, later, allows us to think with even greater intensity about them, about men and women. It's like that here, even in this country, contrary to what we say and contrary to our reputation, contrary to what we ourselves would like to believe. Yes, it's all that other activity that's the parenthesis, not the other way round. Everything one does, everything one thinks, everything else that one thinks and plots about is a medium through which to think about them. Even wars are fought in order to be able to start thinking again, to renew our unending thinking about our men and our women, about those who were or could be ours, about those we know already and those we will never know, about those who were young and those who will be young, about those who've shared our beds and those who never will."